"The happy army travels on its stomach," says Rosenthal, the show's creator and executive producer, a trim man who is nevertheless so preoccupied with eating that he named his production company "Where's Lunch?"

The CBS sitcom was born when Rosenthal and stand-up comedian Ray Romano met for the first time and noshed on sandwiches at Los Angeles' famous Art's Delicatessen. On-screen, most of the show's stories take place in the kitchens of Ray and Debra Barone (Romano and Patricia Heaton) and his pushy parents, Frank and Marie (Peter Boyle and Doris Roberts). Marie's superior cooking abilities are a sore point with her daughter-in-law.

Off-screen, no one in the "Raymond" family ever goes hungry. The cast and crew are greeted with a never-ending bounty of food, from a monstrous production office kitchen stocked with gourmet potato chips, fruits, vegetables and every type of energy bar available on the market, to regular set visits from the staffs of In-N-Out Burger and other popular California eateries, who often cook for the cast and crew on show night.

"It means a lot to people," says Rosenthal. "It's actually not talked about much, but I feel it actually strengthens the sense of community. You're there all day. If the food is really good, you're going to look forward to coming to work a little more. It makes you happy."

Judging by the number of key contributors who have been around since Day One, Rosenthal has done a good job keeping his troops well-fed and happy. The entire cast will return intact next month for the show's seventh season. While writers on hit series usually make fast exits to produce their own shows, six members of the original writing staff (including Rosenthal and Romano) remain - an astounding statistic in the sitcom business and one of the key reasons this comedy classic was even funnier in its sixth year than it was in its first.

"I love it here, and they seem to like it here too," says Rosenthal. "I've gone out of my way to make sure they would like it. Food is one part of it. When I first got my own show, I said to myself, "How are you going to run this show? What are the rules going to be?' I had one rule that I could think of, and that was to be nice. Because I've worked on many shows where it wasn't so nice."

"We could easily be on other shows," says Lew Schneider, one of the original writers. "They could be awful. When the show started to hit, everybody told us, "Two years and get out.' None of us (left), and it was because it was such a good place to work and we had a lot to say."

Rosenthal himself had several chances to walk away. After "Raymond" survived its first season, he signed a lucrative deal to develop other sitcoms with Disney. He was supposed to leave the show after the third season ended, but earlier that year he decided he was happy where he was. So he did something unheard of in Hollywood:

He gave the money back.

"What else could I do?" he says now. "I could've left and taken the money. I guess most people do that. That hurts television, doesn't it? The chances are the show you're going to won't be as good as the show you're leaving, and the show you left suffers because you're not there. So you've hurt two things. I'd rather have one good than two bad."

At the moment, "Raymond" is significantly better than "good." It is the second highest-rated comedy on television, after "Friends." This year, it's been nominated for 11 Emmys, including nods for all five regular castmembers, its most ever. Reruns from earlier seasons are airing nightly in national syndication (and making a small fortune for Rosenthal, Romano and CBS).

"We all think this was our best year," says Rosenthal. "It was certainly our most consistent one."

The script process has remained consistent over the years, following the stories Rosenthal heard about the way Carl Reiner ran "The Dick Van Dyke Show." At the start of the week, Rosenthal will gather the writers together and ask what happened at their homes since their last meeting. Ninety percent of what appears on the show comes straight out of their real lives, which are blessedly rich with embarrasing incident.

Romano briefly lived in the same neighborhood as his parents, which led to the series' basic premise. Tucker Cawley, one of the original writers, once attended a Valentine's Day dinner with his wife and discovered they had nothing to talk about, which inspired the episode "Silent Partners." When Aaron Shure was considering an offer to join the staff in season four, he accidentally taped a "Raymond" episode over his wedding video; this was slightly tweaked in "The Tenth Anniversary" to have Ray erasing his wedding with the Giants-Bills Super Bowl.

"Aaron lost points with his wife and gained them with me," says Rosenthal.

Last year, Rosenthal was attending an event at his son Ben's elementary school and was horrified to hear the boy's creative writing assignment, the story of a bickering husband and wife called "The Angry Family." As a roomful of parents started swiveling in their seats to see if they could locate the inspirations for this awful tale, Rosenthal's shame turned to joy.

"At first, I was mortified," he recalls. "And the very next split-second, I thought, "How lucky am I that I have a son who writes such beautiful material for my television show?' I apologize to Ben for his therapy later, but listen, I've got a show to do."

"Sometimes, my wife and I will be watching (the show)," says Rosenthal, "and it's a fight that we had, and Ray is apologizing and saying exactly what the root of the problem was and understanding, and she'll hit me and say, "How come you understand it for television!'"

The sitcom's curative powers aren't limitless, however.

"One time, I dropped the keys to our van down an elevator shaft," says Schneider, "and my wife is saying, "It's okay, this'll be a great show.' And I say, "Ray dropped his wedding ring into a grate last year. I can't even use it! This is just a (terrible) thing that happened! This is a total loss! Unless I get killed going down there, there is no show!'"

As the years have gone on, the writers have struggled to avoid not only repeating themselves, but repeating stories they've seen on other sitcoms. Every idea gets batted around, twisted this way and that, in the hope of finding a fresh take on old material.

When Ray agrees to teach his daughter Ally about the birds and the bees, he's speechless when he realizes she doesn't want to know how babies are born, but why they're born. When Debra's recently divorced father arrives at Thanksgiving dinner with a new girlfriend on his arm, she's not some aerobicized young chippie, but a sleepy octagenarian who makes him feel young and hip in comparison.

If the subject matter is sometimes unexpected - it may be the raciest family sitcom ever - the style of "Raymond" is proudly old-fashioned. When everyone else in television was trying to ape the superficiality of "Seinfeld" in the mid-'90s, Rosenthal was hearkening back to the emotionally richer days of "The Honeymooners," "All in the Family" and "Taxi." Instead of a show about nothing, he created a show about how the little things - a faulty can opener, a cheap box of tissues - are usually symbolic of bigger problems.

"If there's a trait to the writing on the show," says Rosenthal, who insists that each episode follow a single plot, "it's that we don't do an episode unless there's some kind of emotional underpinning to it, a larger issue that's worth being told for a full 22 minutes without a B-story or a C-story or crazy sets or a lot of erect nipples."

The alliegance to older comedy values also means a concerted effort to avoid the impulse to feed the laughtrack beast with constant setups and punchlines. The writers understand that the longer the series is on, the better the audience understands the characters, which means their silences can often be funnier than their jokes.

"Phil would almost rather get a laugh on a look or a piece of action than on a line of dialogue," says Schneider.

"The audience laughs because they know the character and what the character's thinking," says Tucker Cawley. "That's what makes it easy to write at this point."

While Brad Garrett (as Raymond's resentful brother Robert) does the best reactions, Romano isn't far behind. After beginning the series with virtually no acting experience, Romano has grown leaps and bounds as a performer, and now more than holds his own with Emmy-winning co-stars Heaton and Roberts.

"The breakthrough for Ray was when we talked him into drinking coffee," says Skrovan. "He wouldn't do it at first, because he didn't really drink coffee. Then he said, "Well, I guess I'm gonna have to act now.'"

Rosenthal remembers an argument he had with his star while making the first season's Christmas episode. Rosenthal wanted it to end with Ray kissing his father on the forehead because it would be unexpected and poignant. Romano insisted he would never do such a thing. Rosenthal finally gave up, but Romano changed his mind during the taping and did it. At the end of the season, he sent Rosenthal a card saying, "I never thought I'd thank anybody for making me kiss Peter Boyle."

"Now he's fearless," says Rosenthal. "He'll try anything. People say, "Well, he's just playing himself.' Bull-. Ray isn't that character. He's acting. It's just that he's so good you can't see it."

Ray Romano is a much smarter man and better parent than Ray Barone, according to his loyal writers - but he's also more neurotic than his alter ego.

"He seems so much more normal on television than he is in real life," says Schneider. "He's way more approachable on television than he is in real life."

Romano, who writes at least two episodes a year and consults heavily on the rest, may decide to call it quits after this season if he feels the quality is slipping, according to Rosenthal.

"We don't want to become hacky," Rosenthal says. "We don't want to become a joke bag, just pratfalls and crazy (stuff) that you can't top every week. There's enough of that on television... If we feel that it starts to dip, we won't want to be here anymore.

"We're still watching "The Honeymooners,' and they only did 39 shows. It's not about quantity, it's about quality. The shows that endure are the ones that were good all the time."

While an abrupt ending is unlikely, it might reopen eyes to just how great "Raymond" has been. Despite the big ratings and awards, the show usually gets forgotten by an entertainment media obsessed with the next hot thing - a fact not unnoticed in the writers room, where digs at hipper series like "Sex and the City" aren't uncommon.

But Rosenthal is more concerned with the show's legacy than how many magazine covers it gets today.

"I've always said that I'm doing the show for CBS," says Rosenthal, "but in the back of my mind, it's for Nick at Nite."

Alan Sepinwall may be reached at asepinwall@starledger.com, or at 1 Star-Ledger Plaza, Newark, NJ 07102. Please include your full name and hometown.